I wrote that book on learning to be a chef at the CIA. Then, through a fluke that can happen only if you live in Cleveland (or perhaps as some sort of divine reward for living there), I was invited, via Cleveland food pro Susie Heller, to the French Laundry, in Yountville, California, where Chef Keller, the recent winner of the Outstanding Chef Award from the James Beard Foundation, was planning a cookbook. Keller said he wanted his book to be different. He said he wanted it to be filled with stories in addition to recipes. So I looked for and wrote as many stories as I could find out there in and around Yountville, and as far away as Maine and Hawaii.
The thing that most impressed me then about Keller, who was quickly rising to be one of the most famous and revered chefs in the world, was not the fact that he was becoming this because of miraculous innovations in cooking technique, but rather because he was a maniac about properly cooking green beans—in fact, demanded that his brigade go to absurdly difficult lengths to cook them. He didn’t dismiss the stuff I’d learned at the CIA as child’s play or outdated or overrated, as many chefs did; rather, he embraced the fundamentals of cooking like a mad dog, said the CIA didn’t go far enough. On the inside he was ferocious in his determination—one had to be in order to do the work he was attempting—and on the outside he was all quietness and grace (except to his cooks, no doubt, to whom he was a lot like most chefs, a pain-in-the-ass bastard who could fire you at any moment, only, as he was Keller, more so).
Keller’s literary agent called me after The French Laundry Cookbook and my two chef books had come out to say that her client Eric Ripert had a quirky idea that she thought I might be interested in. Eric, whom I knew to be the chef of Le Bernardin, often called Manhattan’s seafood Mecca, had been for several years running the city’s best restaurant according to the Zagat Survey, the people’s-choice forum. I knew little about Ripert himself, though, other than that he was relatively young to be leading one of New York’s few four-star restaurants, that he was very French, and that, whenever I’d seen him invited to cook on TV, he was a very elegant and articulate guy, handsome besides, and with a heavy accent American chicks really dig.
We met outside Pastis in the Meatpacking District in Manhattan at noon on a spring Sunday. He strode along the crowded street wearing goldish green gogglelike shades that made him look like a bug. He wore jeans and sneakers and was still rushing on the adrenaline of the all-night techno binge that often followed a Saturday night’s service at the restaurant. He was ravenously hungry, and after eating a lardon salad, he devoured a rare burger with a raw yolk on top and a heap of fries.
“Michael, I want to do a book about cooking and art,” he explained. “I want to visit places that will inspire us. I am bringing a painter, photographers. If I can afford it I want to bring a musician. I want you to write, write whatever you wish. We explore art through food and cooking.”
It was the strangest cookbook idea I’d heard of, and I knew it would be all but impossible to pull off and that for me, as the writer, the one in charge of creating an intellectual framework for the book and articulating the often ineffable whims and intuitive musings of the chef, this one was going to be a lot of work for me for very little money. Eric was so ebullient and energetic, though, and so in love with the idea that I couldn’t help but join him. That, plus the opportunity to work with another chef of this caliber and experience (he’d worked for several years as the poissonnier under Joël Robuchon); moreover, the locales he’d be taking us all to—Sag Harbor, Napa, Puerto Rico, and rural Vermont—made the idea especially appealing.
Not long after finishing this book with Eric and company, and in between other longer nonfiction projects on the subjects of wooden boats and heart surgeons, I would return to work with Keller again, traveling in France, to Limoges, to write about his porcelain project, and on to Lyons and Paris, and then back to the Napa Valley, to write about bistros and bistro food.
How could I fail by now to wonder at my circumstance? Eating Eric’s stuffed saddle of lamb, an ode to his mentor, Jean-Louis Palladin, while looking out over the verdant Napa Valley, or lunching on slabs of foie gras with grilled toast and roasted chicken at Chez l’Ami Louis, 32, rue du Vertbois, in Paris’s Third Arrondissement—maybe the best bistro in the world—as research for the Keller bistro book: All of it was in the name of work! What incredible luck! What a gift! All the result of taking good notes in a skills kitchen at the CIA, of watching Julia and making pie with canned pears—and giving in to the shadow urge to write about it.
A main reason for my good fortune, of course, had to do with changes in our culture and its relationship with food, with chefs, with cooking. Food Arts magazine called it a “Food Revolution” and devoted regular articles to exploring its range and reach, and pretty soon everyone was calling it the food revolution. Gourmet magazine, under the formidable Ruth Reichl, had committed itself to exploring the people who were growing our food or producing it by hand, focusing on the local, environmentally minded cheese maker or dairy or hog rancher or apple farmer, and profiling the chefs who were using their products. Consumers now had easy access online to farm-raised pork, Pacific oysters, Maine lobsters, and fresh foie gras that was the same stuff used at the finest restaurants in the country.
Another formidable marker of chef popularity has been the extraordinary success of cable TV’s Food Network. Beginning in 1993, the network had extended its reach into 87 million homes, its prime-time shows watched by a half million people each day. In 2004 the network generated $225 million in advertising revenue and produced 800 hours of programming, numbers not likely to decrease, despite intellectuals’ and serious foodies’ complaints of FN’s dumbing down cooking. The network has only recently gotten into ancillary marketing—partnering Rachael Ray with the company that makes the knives she uses on her program, all three splitting the profits of sales reaped by her endorsement and her show—but such efforts may soon generate as much money as advertising.
In the not-for-profit world of public broadcasting, stations have almost doubled to more than seventy the number of cooking shows they broadcast across the country over the past few years. Food programming is the most popular kind of show PBS produces, its reach far enough to tap my shoulder and ask me to join one.
And, of course, the chef made it onto network reality TV in 2003 in the form of Rocco DiSpirito, on NBC, a show called The Restaurant. The show documented the partnership of DiSpirito and restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow and the ensuing train wreck that ended in lawsuits, court orders, and two closed restaurants. “It was an embarrassment to the industry,” said one insider. But the sexy chef and the New York City restaurant world had proven ready for prime-time network television—more was on its way.
And yet for all this television, for all this interest in chefs, for all the cookbooks pumped out each year—3,591 were published in 2005, more than ever before according to Andrew Grabois, senior director of publisher relations at R. R. Bowker, publisher of Books in Print, an annual database for books published in North America—for all the popularity of chef-driven restaurants and their outposts, for all the chef-brand pots and pans and sauces, I don’t think the chef’s work is understood much better now than it was twenty years ago. Perhaps a little bit better, as the number of culinary students rises, a figure that surely contains more people who might not have chosen culinary school during a time when chefs were less glamorized, but not a lot. Some TV describes how difficult and unglamorous the work is. Gordon Ramsay’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares out of England does it well, and his American show, Hell’s Kitchen, doesn’t, but that’s more a problem with America than with Ramsay. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential was the first book to describe the New York City restaurant kitchen from the vantage of the line cook, to get the culture and the voice right. The book was embraced by cooks and noncooks throughout the world, became a bestseller, and inspired a food-adventure-travel TV show, planting Bourdain in the ranks of international celebrity. (The guy actually gets mob
bed in Asia, says he can’t even leave his hotel room.) He doesn’t cook in the restaurant anymore and doesn’t want to—twenty-eight years of hellish, back-breaking slog was plenty for him. He’s content to option his book to Darren Star, the creator and executive consultant of Sex and the City, for a FOX sitcom. Is it true or glamorized? A little of both, like Hollywood, only on television’s smaller scale.
The Hollywood version can be seen in the film Spanglish, in which Adam Sandler plays a chef of Thomas Keller–like talent and success. Ironically, it’s all about family life, the one thing a chef of that caliber almost never has. It’s an illusion but one we like; we’re comfortable with it. It’s why Bourdain still suits up and returns to the kitchen—for show, for photo shoots and filming—because we like the illusion that the chef actually cooks. The legions who watch Emeril with awestruck wonder want to believe that he’s making this same food in his restaurant all the time. The chef-struck diner still wants to believe that the famous chef at the name-brand restaurant is back in the kitchen personally preparing his food and fussing over its presentation like a foppish milliner. Somehow, we need this fantasy. If there’s going to be magic, a sociologist told me, there’s got to be a magician. And it can’t be just anybody—everybody can’t make magic, or it ceases to be magic. It’s got to be the territory of the magician, of the select few versed in the dark secrets of the elders.
The motive for all my pseudo-highbrow philosophizing, of course, is to conceal a simple selfish fact: I wanted to be back in kitchens. Part of me was still a cook. I missed kitchens—but why? What was I looking for? The work is hard and monotonous, and most of the time I wouldn’t even be cooking, just watching, scribbling notes on my little pad and looking for something to do during the long hours. Thinking of it like this, it should be a relief to know that I’d never hang out in a kitchen again—ever the interloper, the eternal impostor dressed for work in an old CIA chef coat, ink stains at the pocket, and battered Dansko clogs—to peel ginkgo nuts in New York so that I might interrogate Ryan Becze, a young cook working for the sushi Buddha, Masa Takayama; to mince Amy Pickle’s anchovies in Frisco’s iconic Zuni Café because I’ve taken too much of her time in talk and it’s the middle of service and she needs them for the Caesar and mincing those piles of anchovies is an onerous task I can take off her hands (and keep busy), onerous even for those who’ve built up a solid callus on the bottom joint of their index finger and don’t have to wrap their knife hand in a towel to keep from bleeding into the salt-saturated, oil-soaked, soft-boned fish.
“You want to work a station tonight?” Grant Achatz, the former French Laundry sous-chef, asks me one night at Trio. I long for such a chance, of course. And so I take over for CIA extern Stephen Parkerson, dipping a battered shrimp into hot oil for the sixteenth course of a twenty-eight course “Tour de Force” tasting menu and slicing little disks of radishes and hearts of palm, alternating coins on a bed of rain forest plum gelatin with mint oil and microgreens, the garnish for a duck-and-foie course. But the shrimp concoction is not your standard tempura—the delicate Maine crustaceans are skewered onto a vanilla bean along with cured Meyer lemon and a chunk of cranberry sauce that has been gelled with agar so that it won’t melt out, will stay solid even though it’s piping hot within the deep-fried batter. None of these things, especially the delicate jelly and shrimp, want to stay on their fat vanilla bean skewer, a fact necessitating extreme delicacy in battering the construction and swimming it in the hot oil. Having gamely accepted the invitation into the battle of dinner service, I am soon praying to God that this little fish on a stick won’t plop off into the fry oil, again, exactly when the rest of the courses are on their way out the door. Who am I, what am I doing on this line?! “You know what T-F-L stands for?” asks sous-chef David Carrier beside me, also a veteran of the French Laundry, as he slices beef and holds a glass over a smoldering stick of applewood to capture the smoke to send to the diner with the meat. I’m supposed to answer “The French Laundry” as I rest the crispy shrimp tempura into its funky steel holder, but don’t take the bait. “Too Fucking Long,” Carrier says, referring to my fish on a stick.
What was I doing? How many nights did I intend to slot myself out of the way between an order printer and a dish shelf to record the endless drumbeats of “Ordering!” and “Fire!” and “Pickup!”; to watch the unfortunate server returning with four plates of duck, explaining that table fourteen doesn’t eat meat (“They ordered a tasting menu—duck is printed on the menu—and they’re telling us this now?” asks the chef, with intensity); to sympathize with the poor schmuck on sauté who can’t see his way out of the weeds, admitting defeat, dispatching the line cook’s SOS: “I need an all day on the pork, Chef!” (There’s a look of terror in his eyes—he knows he’s going down and he knows he’s powerless to change it. Nothing worse in the world for a cook, nothing. YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH!)
But more often than not—I was in some of the best kitchens in the country—it was uneventful service: a lot of hot pans under control, clean hands plating food, damp rolls of white towels making crescent swipes around edges of plates, smart servers arriving with perfect timing as if by instinct, thumbs on the under-edge of plate rims, the elegance of service in a seamless glide, skills built on repetition, mind numbing, day after day, endless repetition of the very thing that is, in the moment, beautiful to watch—the euphoric timelessness, for those who are in it, of the dance.
I love the professional kitchen. It’s one place in this world where I know there are answers—my answers at least—and answers for a lot of cooks I know. I make eager, compulsive forays into worlds I’ve never seen and return home to write about them. I love these ventures because they’re new, but they’re brief, and I rarely revisit the places or the people, no matter how much a part of me they’ve become. I covet the rank solitude of my office, where I try to make sense of the chaos and restore my soul. But out in the world I’m most at home in a kitchen and so have returned again and again, an impostor cook looking for Answers. Hard, shining surfaces, big machines, steel knives, craftsman’s tools—the Silpat, the wooden spoon, the ring cutter, the pastry brush—sauté pans and flame, the sweet brown smell of stocks kept just at a tremble, the sound of mushrooms in crackling hot oil. Even without the food, it’s a sensory heaven. But add food, an abundance of it, the overflowingness of food at a restaurant doing good business, and the place can be a glory to stand in, to work in. Tools are meaningless without the food. I love the food and I love the physical labor that brings the food and tools and heat and cold together for the great and forever meaningful goal to feed people and to make them happy. To earn your pay and feed yourself.
I love a kitchen’s unspoken rules, the hidden crevices where treachery and stupidity fester, the camaraderie created by intense protracted physical labor, occasional grace, the inarticulate humanity of people who cook to earn their daily bread, the kitchen’s peaceful glades—morning when few are there or late night, surrounded by cooks, service over and the kitchen clean—the private euphoria of service gone well and the private shame of the weeds, known less grandly in kitchen parlance as “getting your ass kicked.”
Perhaps above all, though, what has propelled me back into the kitchen, what convinces me that Answers are there, is the fact that in a good kitchen you can’t lie to yourself. It’s a black-and-white world. A truth pervades the restaurant kitchen that is undeniable, impressive in its immediacy and clarity: Your food is ready or it’s not, you’re in control or you’re a mess, you’re in the dance or you’re in the shit. It’s plain to see.
That this is the critical fact of the professional kitchen became clear to me not in a kitchen but in an operating room, a place closely linked to the professional kitchen in its own, more standardized and professional ethos of cleanliness and orderliness. Both are temples of mise en place (everything in its place, a state of preparedness), of efficiency of movement, of cool decisiveness. My teacher was a young heart surgeon, a doctor in the
harrowing business of opening babies’ chests and fixing their hearts, FUBAR hearts incapable of pumping blood to the system or to the lungs, of sending blue blood to the brain and red blood to the lungs, hearts like Swiss cheese, hearts missing parts, hearts like sponges, opening the chests not of healthy kids who might more easily withstand such a violent assault to the body with power saws and steel clamps, but of babies already critically ill, babies clinging by a thread to life, their parents clinging to the skills of the surgeon by nothing more substantial, the surgeon hunkered over the child’s open chest and stopped heart with the weight of a community squatting on his shoulders.
“It’s clear,” the surgeon told me with a kind of mad grin that described his world. “It’s beautiful. Elegant. Brutal. There are not many jobs where you’re forced to know exactly who you are. You can’t lie to yourself here, because if you lie to yourself, it becomes very obvious. Somebody dies.”
That elemental a world is more by far than I’m prepared to live in on a daily basis, but it helped me to understand the kitchen a little better, and my fascination with it.
Thomas Keller said as much to me one day before service at the French Laundry. This paragon of perfection, of elegance, when asked if he was anxious before service, replied no. “If I fuck up,” he said, “I’m not going to kill anyone.”
This is a major advantage that cooking has over heart surgery, as far as career choices go. But that’s about it. Otherwise the work was more alike than not.
The Reach of a Chef Page 3